The princeling and the provocateur: The changing trends of politics in 2013

The princeling and the provocateur: The changing trends of politics in 2013

The politics of change heads for a sensational climax as Rahul Gandhi vows to overhaul Congress and catch up with the Narendra Modi juggernaut

advertisement

S Prasannarajan

November 30, 1999

ISSUE DATE: January 13, 2014

UPDATED: January 8, 2014 10:41 IST

Narendra Modi with L.K.Advani

The politics of nostalgia is a refusal to accept the uncertainties of the new, and it is kept alive by those who have failed to keep pace with time. Even when history knocks down rusty doors to the Glorious Yesterday, troglodytes of politics don't give up their fight against mortality. In the Great Indian Continuum, though, tradition is seldom broken; the shock of the new is balanced by the weight of inheritance. To realise the enormity of the power shift in 2014, a transition that marks a transformation, just imagine the following four items in one of the world's most volatile marketplaces of politics.

Item Number One: It's a rare fossil that offers the students of political palaeontology an insight into the evolution of the Indian Right. In its back story merges exclusiveness of ideology, mobilisation of angry Hindus, mythicisation of the nation, and the uses of misplaced gods in politics. It also tells a cautionary tale: You may be the long-distance traveller of Indian politics, but the distance between destiny and destination can keep your dream unrealised. This item is tragedy in sepia.

Item Number Two: It's a three-dimensional figure of resurgence and reclamation, of ambition and achievement. The very name of it evokes admiration and awe, faith and fear in equal measure; it unites as well as divides. It has already turned change and development, the oldest cliches in the vocabulary of the populist on the stump, into a mass mantra. It has inspired the base, animated a party long lost in defeatism, and changed the conversation of political India. It is the Indian Right's surge for power; it also mirrors the redundancy of Item Number One.

Item Number Three: It is the granite stillness of the Maximum Leader, and it is also about absolute power without being in office. It marks the bleakest moment in India's oldest party-no more grand, and far removed from the mood of the country. It is Mother Supreme defenceless against the anger of a nation let down by the callous waywardness of the government her party controls. This item highlights the struggle for retaining one of the world's oldest political dynasties. Please don't mistake it for a struggle for retaining the government.

Item Number Four: It is the porcelain princeling of Indian politics, and the last hope of a party on the verge of abandoning hope. It represents the pledge of the son to redeem the party withering away in the shadow of the mother; it is about the inheritor's determination to overhaul the moribund party and thereby preserve his own relevance at a time when there is a growing resentment against politics as usual. It is about reclaiming the Congress legacy as India's natural party of governance. It is the struggle for the future-and the challenge of coming out with a winning counter-argument to the provocateur from the right side of the political spectrum.

Rahul Gandhi is the only viable choice for Congress. But to win the future, he has to emulate not his mother but his grandmother.

Together, they bring out the inevitability of the new and the dispensability of the old in the passage of power. The rise of Narendra Modi is not only about the triumph of a man who has been least inhibited about playing out his ambition. It is, most significantly, about his resistance to the lure of tradition--though he has no intention to break it. To realise the magnitude of the cultural shift within the Sangh Parivar, just look at the patriarch floating in his fantasy.

Yesterday was different. There was only the romance of the Hindu nationalist. Lal Krishna Advani was there in the formative years of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, learning his first lessons in nationalism from Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Deendayal Upadhyaya. He was there to stand up and be jailed for freedom when the totalitarian temptations of Indira Gandhi endangered Indian democracy. He was there, after the formation of BJP on the debris of the Janata experiment, to bring it to the mainstream as the most effective rejoinder to Congress. And he was there in the vanguard to lead the biggest nationalist mobilisation, paving the way for India's first right-wing government. Advani's personal struggle started the moment he ended his political struggle against power. BJP in power marked the beginning of Advani's trauma as Number Two, Atal Bihari Vajpayee soaring above him as India's most favourite moderate.

Today the man who soars above him owes much to the hardcore Hindutva that Advani once embodied, but Advani cannot remain content with the rise of his erstwhile protege; he cannot afford to be just the patron saint of the Indian Right. He believes that his biography makes him the natural choice as the party's prime ministerial candidate. So Modi is the usurper. He is not. Modi's rise as a folk hero of the Indian Right is a measure of his success in striking a fine balance between tradition and modernity. The tradition of Hindutva and the modernity of development politics. His journey from the embers of Gujarat 2002 to the mass consciousness is the story of a man who has internalised the political motifs of the times and turned them into bestselling slogans. When fear defined politics after 9/11, the Gujarat Chief Minister became the national spokesman of anti-terrorism; when President Pervez Musharraf from across the border wore his anti-Indianism on his military sleeve, Modi projected himself as the most passionate apostle of national honour. Then began the unstoppable ascent of the development man and the global endorsement of the so-called Gujarat model, which itself was seen as an inspiring piece of can-do governance in an India going backward. Gujarat was just a stage; his audience was, always, India--also the name of his ambition.

Set against Advani, Modi shops for his political wares not in mythology or in the archival sites of the past, but in the future. Even as BJP sometimes behaves as if it is nothing more than a party of shopkeepers, he is an unabashed worshipper of wealth, echoing the Dengist motto of "it's glorious to be rich". The Right everywhere has always won the economic war and lost the culture war; in India, it was about to lose both. Modi may not have won the culture war yet, but he has won the economic war, and given the pathetic record of the UPA Government in creating an atmosphere for business, it is a victory that puts him in the forefront of the politics of change. He has regained the space of the Right abandoned by his own party; it will be his even if he loses India.

For Rahul Gandhi, to a greater extent, it is a similar battle for reclaiming the lost space of Congress in Indian politics. It is a struggle against history, and personally exhausting for a man whose manifest anger is often neutralised by his latent reluctance. Still, he is the only viable choice. But to win the future, he has to emulate not his mother but his grandmother. In retrospect, ten years ago, it was more a massive defeat of BJP than a great victory of Congress, and when Sonia Gandhi's chosen Prime Minister, after a dutiful first term, began to unmake his own legacy as a moderniser, Manmohan Singh was also contributing to the steady decline of his party. His political boss allowed him, and as the custodian of India's oldest political tradition, Sonia didn't have the idea or the urgency to arrest the Manmohan Singh malady. Today, what stands between Rahul and the future is the Prime Minister, a monument to bad governance. When Rahul publicly called the Government's ordinance to legitimise criminality in politics nonsensical, it was a daring attempt to correct the mother's mistake in 2004. He has to do much more, and he gives the impression that nothing short of an Indian version of perestroika can save Congress. He has to dismantle the entrenched old order the way Indira Gandhi outwitted the Syndicate to begin her journey as Mother India.

Rahul has already taken his first tentative steps of that journey. He has portrayed himself as an outsider to save the party from the morass of the Manmohan era, and the man walking ahead of him on the other side of the political divide too symbolises the possibilities of the outsider. Suddenly, adding to the atmospherics of transformation, there is a third man, the ultimate stranger in power. Enter Arvind Kejriwal, born out of the anti-political movement of Anna Hazare, and the politics of change gains a triad of heroes as outsiders. Tomorrow is another sensational day in Indian democracy.

Follow the writer on Twitter @prasannara

Get real-time alerts and all the news on your phone with the all-new India Today app. Download from